Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard 英文原版

　　Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is the story of Sampath
Chawla, born in a time of drought into a family not quite like
other families, in a town not quite like other towns. After years
of failure at school, failure at work, of spending his days
dreaming in the tea stalls and singing to himself in the public
gardens, it does not seem as if Sampath is going to amount to much.
“But the world is round,” says his grandmother. “Wait and see!” No
one believes her, until one day Sampath climbs a guava tree in
search of peaceful contemplation and becomes unexpectedly famous as
a holy man. Sampath’s newfound fame sends the tiny town of Shahkot
into turmoil. His feisty sister falls in love with the very
unsuitable Hungry Hop Ice Cream Boy; a syndicate of larcenous,
alcoholic monkeys terrorizes the pilgrims who cluster around
Sampath’s tree; his father attempts to turn the orchard into a
highly profitable carnival scene; and an overzealous spy determines
to get to the bottom of it all and, to his consternation, achieves
this goal in a most unpleasant way.

　　Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971 and educated in India,
England, and the United States. She studied creative writing at
Columbia University, where she was the recipient of a Woolrich
fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Salman
Rushdie’s anthology Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing. In
2006 Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance
of Loss.

　　Born during a torrential rainstorm, in Shahkot, India, to a
mother whom the neighbours find distinctly odd, Sampath Chawla is a
disappointment to his family. Nothing but trouble from the start,
he disgraces himself at a wedding party, loses his job at the local
post office and runs away from home to take refuge in the guava
orchard, at the top of a guava tree. There he is mistaken for a
holy man and seer when he reveals intimate secrets about the local
inhabitants (gleaned from reading their mail in idle moments at the
post office). His father can see there is money, at last, to be
made from his idle son and sets about doing so with determination.
A local journalist, however, is equally determined to unmask him.
Although Desai writes with considerable flair, employing an
inventive style of English reminiscent of a line of Indian authors
from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy, there is something tiresome
about this relentlessly perky comedy, and one has a slight
suspicion that the European reader is being hoodwinked with
fashionable pastiche. Midnight’s Children has a lot to answer for.
–Lisa Jardine –This text refers to an alternate Paperback
edition.

　　That summer the heat had enveloped the whole of Shahkot in a
murky yellow haze. The clutter of rooftops and washing lines that
usually stretched all the way to the foothills at the horizon grew
blurred and merged with the dust-filled sky. ‘Problems have been
located in the cumulus that have become overly heated,’ read Mr.
Chawla from the newspaper. ‘It is all a result of volcanic ash
thrown up in the latest spurt of activity in Tierra del Fuego.’ And
a little later he reported to whomever might be listening: ‘The
problem lies in the currents off the West African coastline and the
unexplained molecular movement observed in the polar ice-caps.’
And: ‘Iraq attempts to steal monsoon by deliberately creating low
pressure over desert provinces and deflecting winds from India.’
And even: ‘Hungarian musician offers to draw rain clouds from
Europe to India via the music of his flute.’ ‘Why can’t they think
of serious solutions?’ asked Mr. Chawla. ‘It is too hot to fool
about with Hungarian musicians.’ Shahkot boasted some of the
highest temperatures in the country and here there were dozens of
monsoon-inducing proposals. Mr. Chawla himself submitted a proposal
to the forestry department for the cutting and growing of
vegetation in elaborate patterns; the army proposed the scattering
and driving of clouds by jet planes flying in a special geometric
formation; the police a frog wedding to be performed by temple
priests. Vermaji of the university invented a giant fan which he
hoped would attract the southern monsoon clouds by creating a wind
tunnel moving north toward the Himalayas, and he petitioned the
Electricity Supply Board for enough power to test it. Amateur
scientists from Mr. Barnala of Tailor Gully to Miss Raina from the
Sainik Farms area attended trade fairs where they displayed
instruments that emitted magnetic rays and loud buzzing sounds.
Everyone in the town was worried. The mercury in the police station
thermometer exceeded the gradations Kapoor & Sons Happy Weather
Company had seen fit to establish, leaping beyond memory and
imagination, and outdoing the predictions of even Mr. Chawla’s
mother, Ammaji, who liked to think she knew exactly what the future
would bring. It was a summer that sent the dizzy pulse of fever
into the sky, in which even rules and laws that usually stood
straight and purposeful grew limp, like plants exposed to the
afternoon sun, and weak. The heat softened and spread the roads
into sticky pools of pitch and melted the grease in the Brigadier’s
mustache so that it drooped and uncurled, casting shadows on his
fine, crisp presence. It burned the Malhotra’s daughter far too
dark for a decent marriage and caused the water, if it came at all,
to spurt, scalding, from the taps. The bees flew drunk on nectar
that had turned alcoholic; the policemen slept all day in the
banana grove; the local judge bribed an immigration official and
left to join his brother in Copenhagen. Foreigners in their tour
buses turned and went home, while Shahkotians argued for spots
directly below their ceiling fans, leaving only for minutes if
absolutely necessary and then hurrying back. In the marketplace,
they raided the shops for palm leaf fans and bought gray blocks of
ice that smoked like small fires. They rested their heads against
the coolness of melons before cutting into them, held glasses
against cheeks and foreheads between sips, fanned themselves at the
stove with bunches of spinach before letting go reluctantly, for
the sake of the evening meal. The weeks passed, but the monsoon did
not arrive. And by the time it was September, they had given up
hope. It was this year that Sampath Chawla was born to his mother,
Kulfi. She was twenty-one years old, newly married to Mr. Chawla,
and pregnant. By late September the heat and lack of rain had
combined to produce terrible conditions of drought. She grew bigger
as it got worse. It got to be so bad that famine-relief camps were
set up by the Red Cross to the west of Shahkot. The supply planes
flew right over the bazaar and Shahkotians, watching with their
heads tilted back, wondered why they didn’t stop for them as well,
for surely they were suffering quite enough to warrant the same
attention and care being so assiduously delivered elsewhere. The
ration shop was distributing rice and lentils in smaller and
smaller portions all the time. There was no fruit to be found
anywhere and hardly any vegetables. Prices had risen so high,
nobody would buy the scraggy chickens sitting in cages outside the
meat shop. Finally the poor butcher had to eat them himself, and
after the last one, he was forced to turn vegetarian like the rest
of the town. Kulfi, in these months, was so enormously large, she
seemed to be claiming all the earth’s energy for herself, sapping
it dry, leaving it withered, shriveled and yellow. People stopped
short in amazement as she walked down the street. How big she was!
They forgot their dealings in the almost empty marketplace. They
teetered on their bicycles as they looked around for just another
sight of that stomach extending improbably before her like a huge
growth upon a slender tree. Her eyes were so dark, so sooty and
vehement, though, these people who turned their heads to stare
turned quickly away again, ill at ease for some reason and
unsettled. Not noticing them, she passed by as if they weren’t
there at all. On her face, about her mouth and in the set of her
chin was an expression intent and determined but yet far away and
distant, as if all her thoughts were concentrated upon a point
invisible to everybody but herself. She walked through Shahkot like
this, as distracted as this, as strange as this. ‘What do you
expect?’ asked Ammaji, her mother-in-law, making excuses when
curious neighbors asked about Kulfi’s state of mind. ‘What do you
expect from a woman with a baby in her belly like a little fish?’
But Kulfi was not thinking of the baby in her belly like a little
fish. She was thinking of fish themselves. Of fish in many forms.
Of fish big enough and good enough to feed the hunger that had
overtaken her in the past months like a wave. She thought of fish
curries and fish kebabs. Of pomfret, bekti, ruhi. Of shoals of
whiskered shrimp. Of chewy mussels. She thought of food abundant in
all its many incarnations. Of fenugreek and camel milk, yam and
corn. Mangoes and coconuts and custard apples. Mushrooms sprouting
like umbrellas in the monsoon season. Nuts, wrinkled in their
shells, brown-skinned, milky-fleshed. The house was small for her
big desire. She walked from the tiny blue bedroom to the kitchen
thick with the smell of kerosene, around the table and chairs, up
and down the balcony, down the stairs past the rooms of neighbors
who shook their heads over her, then around the jamun tree in the
middle of the courtyard. ‘Oh dear, what is going to become of this
woman?’ said Lakshmiji, the Raipurs, the Bengali teacher, and all
of the others when they looked out of their windows, when they
gossiped at the tea stall or sat in each other’s houses eating
peanuts together. ‘There was always something odd about her,’ they
said. ‘You could tell this from the minute she entered Shahkot.’
Meal after meal of just rice and lentils could not begin to satisfy
the hunger that grew inside Kulfi; she bribed the vegetable sellers
and the fruit sellers and the butcher with squares of silk, with
embroidery, a satin petticoat, an earring set in gold, a
silver.nutcracker, bits of her dowry that had not yet been pawned.
She bribed them until they had nothing left to give her anyway. By
then, her hunger was so fierce, it was like a big, prowling animal.
In her mind, aubergines grew large and purple and crisp, and then,
in a pan, turned tender and melting. Ladyfingers were flavored with
tamarind and coriander. Chicken was stewed with cloves and
cardamom. She thought of chopping and bubbling, of frying, slicing,
stirring, grating. ‘What on earth is she doing?’ shouted Mr. Chawla
as he watched his wife disappear down the road to the marketplace
again and again, as he surveyed the emptying cupboards in the
house, the missing items, the gaps on the shelves. ‘What have you
married me to, Amma?’ he demanded fer